Eva Ibbotson

“Coronel?” Lorenzo, still shrugging on his jacket, turned to his master.

“It was I who rang.” The authority in her voice surprised Rom and augured well for the future he had planned. “I have decided to sleep in the Blue Suite—please see that it is prepared. And be so kind as to ask Maliki and Rainu to come to me. I wish,” said Harriet, “to take a bath.”

Chapter Fifteen

“I am ruined,” said Harriet, waking in the great white-netted bed. The word seemed to her so beautiful that she spoke it again to herself, very softly: “Ruined. I am a fallen woman.”

She turned her head on the pillow. Rom’s dark head was half-buried in the sheet, one arm thrown out in sleep. The problem now was what to do with so much happiness; now to contain it and not let it spill out and disturb him. Happiness like this could almost certainly disturb people and Rom must not be woken by her. Not ever woken…

I have put myself beyond the reach of decent women, thought Harriet, trying out different variations of her fall and smiling at the ceiling.

A new world lay before her—a world at whose existence she had not even guessed. The mystics knew it, and perhaps God Himself and possibly Johann Sebastian Bach in places… but none of them had been ruined by Rom, so they could not know it as she knew it.

Moving very slowly, very carefully, she put one foot on the ground, looking at it speculatively because the foot, like the rest of her, had been ruined and felt totally beautiful and totally good, as though each separate toe had shared the extraordinary bliss of the previous night. The negligee that Maliki had wrapped around her after her bath was lying across a chair and she put it on, because she was not yet accustomed to being a loose woman and was not certain that she ought to walk around the room with nothing on. Moreover she was going on a pilgrimage, and pilgrimages were better conducted in negligees.

Because she had to remember this room. It was Rom’s own room, to which he had carried her from the Blue Suite, and she had to remember every single thing in it so that years later she could come back here in her mind. Even on her deathbed she must be able to come back here and walk across the deep white carpet, knowing that behind her Rom still slept… Particularly on her deathbed. She had to remember this chair on which his clothes lay and the pattern made by his shirt against the gold brocaded silk… and she traced with one finger the fleurs de lys woven in Lyons two hundred years ago so that she, a ruined girl and the happiest person in the world, could delight in their intricacy.

She had to remember for always the shape of the carved handles on the chest of drawers and the glint of the carriage clock, its hands at ten to six. She had to remember the books lying on the low table—three books with leather bindings and beside them a small bronze dragon and Rom’s fountain pen. She had to remember the Persian rug spread on the carpet and that was going to be difficult: she must work and work at remembering that, for the squares and diamonds of cinnamon and amethyst and pearl were unbelievably complex.

She must remember how it felt to walk barefoot to the window and lift the curtain a little… The mosquito netting had trapped a moth, which must not die because nothing was allowed to die on the morning of her ruin, and which she freed and saw flutter up to the lamp. Which meant that she must study the lamp, too: five petals of rosy glass held by a silver chain…

“Who gave you permission to leave my side?”

She spun around. Rom was leaning on one arm, looking at her. He was awake, alive—he had not perished in the night!

“I was getting to know the room,” she said.

“So I saw. But you happen to be further away than I care for.”

“Then I will come back.” She came to him and hung her head, for what she saw in his eyes was too much even for a woman as officially depraved as she now was.

“I thought perhaps I should get dressed?” she suggested.

“No, I’m not very keen on that,” said Rom in conversational tones.

“Actually it’s difficult, because I only have my Wili costume. But I can’t go out into the garden without my clothes.”

“Ah… But you aren’t going into the garden.”

“Am I not?” She considered this. Then her face crunched into the urchin smile which had so surprised him when he first saw her with Manuelo’s baby under the trees. “Well, I will come back—only I would like to creep from the foot of the bed into your presence, like the odalisques did with Suleiman the Great.”

“Over my dead body will you creep!”

“But if I wanted to?”

He pulled her down so that she lay against his shoulder. “It’s bad for people to get what they want—it deprives them of their dreams. I’ll explain it to you. Later…”

Harriet lifted her head. “How many times a day can one be ruined?” she asked—not in any way displeased, just interested.

“We shall have to find out.” And his mouth suddenly twisted: “Oh, God, I have ruined you, too, you gallant girl, but I swear—”